My second wife

I met JP at a Mensa meeting quite soon after splitting with wife D. but nothing much came of it for a while.

JP had very thick and well-coloured brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin, a big mouth, a very slim waist, high cheekbones and a perennial smile. She was obviously intelligent, was tall (5'8"), listened to classical music, had a good sense of humour, was very diplomatic and I liked her body -- slim but with plenty of breast and a nice bottom as well. You normally get one or the other but not both. 

She was a medical detailer (salesperson for a drug company) when I met her and already owned a few investment properties. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 31.7.1932 and grew up there but also had some German noble blood in her (whatever that means). Her original surname (her father was killed in the war and her mother remarried) was German: A quite prominent aristocratic name in both Germany and France.

JP's family actually came from Aberdeen rather than Glasgow. Joy remembers her father as giving her "coalies" (rides on his back) while she was a child and as playing his violin. She also felt that I was like her father in many ways.

After travelling around a lot in Britain and overseas during her days as a nurse, JP emigrated with her brother  to Australia when she was in her early 30s. Her mother and stepfather followed soon after.

She is a bit eccentric and does not have much dress-sense but as I am eccentric and care little about dress too that suited me quite well. She had had various relationships before she met me but had never married or had children. That really is a bit strange as she was in my experience of her a very loving person. I remember I used to give her a lot of bear-hugs.

She has an almost obsessive interest in anything medical. No wonder she started out as a nurse. Our dinner conversations would sometimes be about the latest academic journal articles on matters of interest to her. We are still good friends. A curious thing about Jb is that she was a smoker when I met her but I never knew it. She knew my dislike of it so just did not smoke in my presence and then just gave it up altogether. She must not have been heavily addicted. It paid off, however. Some years later she did a spirometry test and was found to have early emphysema (of which her mother later died). The specialist who ran the spirometry told her that by giving up smoking when she met me she had added ten years to her life!

Married

Around 1975 I moved  in with her and married her about a year later -- on 15.5.1976. She was 43 at the time and I was 32 but that did not worry me as I had been told that I was infertile and could not have kids anyway.

JP on our  honeymoon at Peregian beach. Note that waist.

The wedding was a "Scottish" one (at the Waverley Presbyterian church!) with many of the male guests (and myself) wearing the kilt. I also made up a tape of all the best Scottish sentimental songs and played it for a large part of our wedding reception.

You should have seen the funny faces as all the Scots tried to restrain the tears! I hadn't quite foreseen that but perhaps I should have. Anyway, it certainly did a lot of Scottish hearts good to see a Scots lass wed so far from home but amid such devotion to all things Scottish. Just writing that sentence brought tears to my eyes so I must be a pretty solid sentimentalist too.

JP and I were together for about 8 years and she suited me very well. During the day I would usually be busy at University with my research and writing but I still kept good working class hours and would arrive home at about 5 p.m. -- like my father before me. Our usual routine of an evening was for us to sit around and chat between 5 and 6 p.m., go out to an ethnic restaurant at 6 and take a bottle of wine.

In 1977 I went to London on my Sabbatical year. JP came with me but stayed only 2 or 3 months. While she was there she wanted a job. As she was still an SRN from her Glasgow days, so she first looked into becoming a "temp" nurse. She found it offered one pound an hour. She thought that was a bit derisory so looked for a job as a "temp" secretary. She also had those skills. She found that she could get TWO pounds an hour as a secretary so did the obvious. But something seems wrong there. British socialism?

She also noted that some of the hospitals she knew had new buildings attached. She was excited to see the new wards. Alas, they were office buildings: British bureaucracy. Puzzle solved. All that health bureaucracy required a lot of staff. So the big demand for secretaries bid up the wages of secretaries to double the wages of nurses. No doubt all those extra clerks cured a lot of people of their illnesses!

When I got back to Sydney I resumed my interest in Real Estate. I bought a block of flats at 13 Wallis Pde., Bondi in conjunction with JB. I put in 25% and she put in 75% of the cost. They were the first places I "did up" -- prior to strata-titling them. We later bought other properties  but most of our business activities for some years afterwards consisted of managing what we had -- cleaning up after tenants, getting new tenants etc. We seemed to be doing a re-letting almost every second weekend as we had over 20 properties between us.

We lived for a couple of years in a rented unit at Randwick and then also for a time at 6 Norton St, Kingsford -- a house which JP bought. It was next to her mother's house at 4 Norton St. 6 Norton St was just outside the Uni of NSW fence so for a couple of the 12 years I was a university lecturer I used to walk to work. When we eventually let 6 Norton St out it was to a Chinese man who liked the property because he thought it looked "very crean" (sic).

After that we moved into first flat 3 and then flat 4 of our building at 13 Wallis Pde. -- with a view to doing them up for sale. Dinyar Mistry lived with us for a while in flat 3 and the smells of his delicious Parsee cooking were really distracting. We "raided" his evening meals from time to time, rather to his amusement.

Leaving Sydney

When I began to get near 40 years of age I began (as many men do) to feel that I was in a rut (the mid-life crisis) and resolved to retire to Queensland. JP and I had a great life together with everything more or less as I wanted it but I still felt that I wanted to make an entirely new start for the second half of my life -- including a new female or females in my life.

I think she was 51 when we split up so it was pretty devastating for her. It was for a long time too upsetting to her even to see me but she has now got over that and seems to love me as much as ever! I think why I left her had a little to do with her beginning to look older but the main reason was simply the mid-life crisis, the need for a new life.

When I was no longer around to protect her interests she eventually took big risks in real estate and ended up making some costly mistakes. Optimism's reward! Her constant pleasantness, good cheer, enthusiasm and intelligence did however make her a quite remarkable person and I do regard myself as lucky to have had so much time with such a fine woman.

At the time I left Sydney I already had enough equity in Real Estate to provide income to live on if need be so did not need to continue in employment. I set the date for retirement from the Uni at Feb '83 when I was 39.

A few weeks before I was due to leave I told JP that I would not take her with me into retirement. I handled it rather badly, causing her more upset than was needful. I suppose after such a long relationship it is hard to handle things coolly.

The fact that I left my wife, my job, my city of residence and most of my friends does show, I suppose, that I even went about my mid-life crisis with my usual thoroughness. I do see myself as having had a really good mid-life crisis with generally very good outcomes. Anyway, at the beginning of March 1983 I drove up to Brisbane.